KATYN, Russia – The leaders of Russia and Poland paid tribute to Russian and Polish victims of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and vowed to overcome painful historic memories that continue to sour bilateral relations.
At a sombre ceremony in Katyn forest, prime minister Vladimir Putin urged Poles not to blame the Russian people for the murder of 22,000 Polish officers by Stalins NKVD secret police in 1940 and to look to the future, not just the past.
“We cannot change the past but we can establish and preserve the truth and that means historical justice. Polish and Russian historians are now working to uncover this truth and to allow an opening between our countries,” said Putin.
The mass murder of thousands of Polish prisoners of war and intelligentsia at Katyn in spring 1940 – just months after Nazi Germany and Stalin carved up Poland – is an enduring symbol for Poles of their suffering under totalitarian Soviet rule.
For 50 years Moscow blamed the Nazis for the deaths and only acknowledged its responsibility in 1990, a year after the fall of communism in Poland. The Kremlin has resisted Polish calls to brand the Katyn massacre a “genocide”.
The tranquil site, set among pine and birch trees in western Russia, also contains the graves of many Russians executed on Stalin’s orders, including during the Great Terror of the 1930s.
As expected, Mr Putin, a former agent in the KGB, a successor organisation to the NKVD, did not apologise for the Katyn murders. He stressed the common suffering of Russians, Poles and other groups under Stalin’s autocratic rule. – (Reuters)